An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers

@guardian.co.tt

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has de­fend­ed the Gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to di­vest sev­er­al state-owned en­ter­pris­es, point­ing to the fi­nan­cial de­te­ri­o­ra­tion of Trinidad Lake As­phalt Lim­it­ed (Lake As­phalt) as ev­i­dence of the risks of al­low­ing loss-mak­ing com­pa­nies to re­ly on tax­pay­er fund­ing.

In a Face­book post yes­ter­day, Per­sad-Bisses­sar re­spond­ed to crit­i­cism from for­mer Op­po­si­tion MP and tourism min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell, ac­cus­ing the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) of mis­man­ag­ing state en­ter­pris­es and ar­gu­ing that pub­lic funds should ben­e­fit cit­i­zens rather than sub­sidise fail­ing busi­ness­es.

The Gov­ern­ment has an­nounced plans to di­vest Na­tion­al Quar­ries Lim­it­ed, Hilton Trinidad, the Mag­dale­na Grand Beach and Golf Re­sort, and the La Brea In­dus­tri­al De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed (LABID­CO).

Mitchell has chal­lenged the move, main­tain­ing that the as­sets be­long to the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go and should not be sold with­out a clear ex­pla­na­tion of why di­vest­ment is prefer­able to re­struc­tur­ing and im­prov­ing their per­for­mance.

In her re­sponse, Per­sad-Bisses­sar re­lied on fig­ures from a re­port she said was sub­mit­ted to the Gov­ern­ment by Lake As­phalt’s board of di­rec­tors.

Ac­cord­ing to the Prime Min­is­ter, the com­pa­ny held a cash bal­ance of $279.34 mil­lion in Sep­tem­ber 2015, when the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress left of­fice, but just $3,400 when a new UNC-ap­point­ed board as­sumed con­trol in Sep­tem­ber 2025.

“Over ten years un­der the PNM, $279.337 mil­lion van­ished,” she wrote, de­scrib­ing the com­pa­ny as bank­rupt.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar al­so claimed that Lake As­phalt’s as­set val­ue fell from $399.47 mil­lion to $229.8 mil­lion dur­ing the same pe­ri­od, a de­cline of ap­prox­i­mate­ly $169.67 mil­lion. Re­tained earn­ings, she said, dropped from $173.96 mil­lion to $1.37 mil­lion, rep­re­sent­ing a de­crease of $172.59 mil­lion.

The Prime Min­is­ter fur­ther al­leged that a pre­vi­ous board paid a for­eign com­pa­ny $21 mil­lion, equiv­a­lent to rough­ly US$3 mil­lion, for bi­tu­men that was nev­er de­liv­ered.

She ar­gued that such fig­ures demon­strate why the Gov­ern­ment should not con­tin­ue to pro­vide fi­nan­cial sup­port to strug­gling state en­ter­pris­es.

“Gov­ern­ment rev­enues must be used to ben­e­fit law-abid­ing, hon­est cit­i­zens; it should not be used to pro­vide wel­fare to fail­ing state-run busi­ness­es,” she wrote.

Mitchell, how­ev­er, has fo­cused much of his crit­i­cism on the pro­posed di­vest­ment of LABID­CO, con­tend­ing that its strate­gic im­por­tance to the en­er­gy sec­tor war­rants care­ful scruti­ny.

In a sep­a­rate Face­book post, he not­ed that LABID­CO owns and man­ages the La Brea In­dus­tri­al Es­tate, home to what he de­scribed as the coun­try’s on­ly off­shore plat­form fab­ri­ca­tion yard and the Caribbean’s largest off­shore plat­form con­struc­tion fa­cil­i­ty.

As an ex­am­ple of the es­tate’s in­dus­tri­al ca­pa­bil­i­ty, Mitchell point­ed to the re­cent load-out of Shell’s Man­a­tee plat­form jack­et, a struc­ture weigh­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 5,000 tonnes and stand­ing 384 feet tall. The jack­et was fab­ri­cat­ed at TOF­CO’s La Brea yard.

He al­so ref­er­enced BP’s Ju­niper plat­form top­sides, pre­vi­ous­ly the largest off­shore plat­form fab­ri­cat­ed in Trinidad and To­ba­go, ar­gu­ing that the fa­cil­i­ty is the re­sult of de­lib­er­ate ef­forts to build lo­cal ca­pac­i­ty with­in the en­er­gy sec­tor.

Mitchell ques­tioned the scope of the pro­posed di­vest­ment, ask­ing whether it would in­clude LABID­CO it­self, the 407-acre in­dus­tri­al es­tate, the fab­ri­ca­tion yard, or the com­pa­ny’s in­ter­est in the Port of Brighton.

He al­so raised con­cerns about the im­pli­ca­tions for ten­ants, em­ploy­ees and sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties, as well as the po­ten­tial ef­fects on lo­cal-con­tent par­tic­i­pa­tion and do­mes­tic off­shore fab­ri­ca­tion ca­pac­i­ty.

Mitchell called for the dis­clo­sure of as­set val­u­a­tions, de­tails of the prop­er­ties un­der con­sid­er­a­tion for di­vest­ment, and the strate­gic analy­sis in­form­ing the Gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion.

His lat­est com­ments fol­low ear­li­er crit­i­cism in which he char­ac­terised the pro­posed di­vest­ments as a po­ten­tial “fire sale” of na­tion­al as­sets and called for trans­paren­cy re­gard­ing prospec­tive buy­ers and safe­guards against con­flicts of in­ter­est.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar, mean­while, has main­tained that the Gov­ern­ment will pro­ceed with plans to di­vest loss-mak­ing state en­ter­pris­es, ar­gu­ing that pub­lic funds should not be used to sus­tain busi­ness­es that are fi­nan­cial­ly un­vi­able.

The de­bate high­lights the ten­sion be­tween the fi­nan­cial per­for­mance of state-owned en­ter­pris­es and their broad­er strate­gic val­ue, rais­ing ques­tions about whether di­vest­ment, re­struc­tur­ing or con­tin­ued state own­er­ship would best serve tax­pay­ers and the na­tion­al econ­o­my.